Press Releases
NIH awards Radianse $1.5 million to test the impact
of real-time location on healthcare efficiency, safety
Indoor positioning solution at Massachusetts General Hospital's OR of the Future objectively measures interactions among patients and clinicians; expansion to Radiology planned
Boston, MA, October 26, 2004 - Having confirmed the consistent accuracy of a Radianse indoor positioning solution (IPS) in locating patients and staff, Radianse and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Boston, have launched the second phase of a study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The $1.5 million, 18-month grant will be used to validate the use of accurate, time-stamped location data to objectively measure care processes. MGH uses its Radianse IPS to provide real-time location data about surgical patients as they move through the continuum of surgical care.
The NIH-funded project will also seek to demonstrate the cost effectiveness and utility of deploying this system in the surgical environment. Early results will be available in late 2005.
A 2003 NIH grant funded Phase I of the study, which proved the accuracy of a prototype Radianse IPS installed in the OR of the Future (ORF) at MGH. Phase II uses a commercially-available Radianse IPS, which is at work across five MGH buildings where perioperative care is situated. The system will be further deployed in the MGH Department of Radiology to allow tracking of surgical patients who spend time in Radiology as part of their plan of care.
Unbiased, context-sensitive data
"There is tremendous value in being able to objectively measure the interactions among the clinical teams and with their patients", said Marie Egan, RN, MS, project manager for the ORF. "This is not a human observer with a clipboard watching every move. We remove any hint of bias, or human error, and collect true measures of patient flow-time, wait-time and resource utilization from registration to surgery to recovery information we can use to tackle some very compelling challenges: are we wasting time, missing opportunities, stretching our staff too far, compromising safety?"
"For Radianse, the study is a significant step toward demonstrating the potential of our system to enable context-sensitive medicine", said Michael Dempsey, chief executive and technology officer of Radianse. "Location is important, and our IPS clearly provides that data with the greatest accuracybut recognizing and acting upon specific combinations of identity, time and location data offers the greatest potential to identify and remove bottlenecks and improve care."
How it works
At MGH, Radianse active-RFID-tags are worn by patients and surgical staff and attached to medical equipment. Radio signals transmit from the tags to Radianse receivers connected to the hospital's LAN and then to Web-based location software, which analyzes the transmission to determine who or what is where/when. This identity, location and time data are easily shared through standards-based interfaces with clinical or hospital information systems. The data can be used to trigger pre-determined notifications, for example, a message to the surgical team that the patient is prepped or an alert that the wrong patient is in the wrong procedure room.
Egan and her team will apply all the collected information to develop and further test new processes, whether it's a change in the supply function to ensure the appropriate equipment is in place for surgeries or a scheduling change to accommodate more procedures.
The OR of the Future
The ORF, which opened in August 2002, is a collaboration among the hospital's departments of Surgery, Anesthesia and Nursing, the Center for Integration of Medicine and Technology (CIMIT) and several industry partners. The goal is to bring together innovative, state-of-the-art technologies in a "live" surgical environment, and quantify the effect of these technologies in relation to patient care, cost and efficiency.
About Radianse
Radianse provides intelligent solutions for healthcare by automatically collecting and processing real-time location data, movement history, associations and relationship information on high-value assets, including equipment, patients and staff. Our patented algorithms and advanced software applications help optimize business processes, enhance patient throughput, reduce costs and improve operational efficiency within healthcare. Radianse products have been installed in more than 75 hospitals.